Compliance monitoring is the ongoing process of checking that an organization is following all the rules, regulations, and standards that apply to its operations. In simple terms, it's about making sure a company is "playing by the rules" set by governments, industry bodies, or its own policies
This practice is critical in several industries, including:
Healthcare
Finance and banking
Pharmaceuticals
Energy and utilities
Food and beverage manufacturing
Environmental services
Compliance monitoring helps ensure that an organization follows laws and rules. It helps avoid legal problems and fines, and it builds the organization's reputation and trust with clients and partners.
Key Components of Compliance Monitoring
Effective compliance monitoring involves several important parts working together. At its core, there's a clear set of rules or standards that a company needs to follow. These could be laws, industry regulations, or even the company's own policies. Visit our compliance audits page to explore different compliance frameworks and regulations in detail.
Next comes the crucial step of actually checking compliance. This involves regularly examining the company's activities and comparing them against established rules and regulations. It's essentially a health check-up for the business, ensuring everything is running according to plan. For companies looking to streamline this process, Gart Solutions offers specialized services to help assess regulatory compliance. Our expertise can be particularly valuable in navigating complex regulatory landscapes, providing businesses with peace of mind that they're meeting all necessary standards and requirements.
Read more: Gart’s Expertise in ISO 27001 Compliance Empowers Spiral Technology for Seamless Audits and Cloud Migration
Good record-keeping is another crucial piece. Companies need to keep detailed notes about what they're doing and how they're following the rules. This helps prove they're on track if anyone asks.
There's also the tech side of things. Many companies use special software to help track and manage their compliance efforts. This can make the whole process smoother and more accurate.
Read more about RMF (Resource Management Framework) a unified system for monitoring digital solutions for landfills that we developed for our client.
Lastly, there's the response plan. This is what the company does if they find they're not following a rule. It might involve fixing the problem, reporting it to the right people, or changing how things are done to prevent it from happening again.
Risk Assessment: Finding out where things might go wrong
Policies and Procedures: Writing down clear rules for everyone to follow
Training: Teaching employees about the rules and why they matter
Regular Checks: Looking at work often to make sure rules are being followed
Reporting: Keeping track of how well the company is following rules
Technology: Using computers and software to help monitor things
Updating: Changing the monitoring system when new rules come out
Response Plan: Knowing what to do if a rule is broken
Documentation: Keeping good records of all compliance activities
Leadership Support: Making sure bosses take compliance seriously
All these parts work together to create a strong compliance monitoring system, helping companies stay on the right side of the rules and avoid potential problems.
Types of Compliance Monitoring
Compliance monitoring comes in various forms, each serving a specific purpose in ensuring an organization adheres to relevant rules and regulations.
One common type is regulatory compliance monitoring. This focuses on making sure a company follows laws and regulations set by government agencies. For example, a bank might monitor its practices to ensure it complies with anti-money laundering laws.
Internal compliance monitoring is another important type. Here, companies check if their employees are following internal policies and procedures. This could involve reviewing expense reports to ensure they match company guidelines, or checking that proper safety protocols are being followed in a manufacturing plant.
Industry-specific compliance monitoring is crucial for businesses operating in highly regulated sectors. For instance, healthcare providers must monitor their practices to ensure patient data privacy, while food manufacturers need to check that their production processes meet food safety standards.
Environmental compliance monitoring has become increasingly important. Companies, especially those in manufacturing or energy sectors, must track their environmental impact to ensure they're meeting pollution control regulations.
Financial compliance monitoring is critical for publicly traded companies. This involves ensuring accurate financial reporting and adhering to accounting standards to maintain investor trust and meet stock exchange requirements.
Lastly, there's technology compliance monitoring. With the rise of data protection laws, companies must monitor how they collect, use, and store digital information to protect consumer privacy and prevent data breaches.
Each type of compliance monitoring plays a vital role in helping organizations navigate the complex landscape of rules and regulations they face in today's business world.
Challenges in Compliance Monitoring
One of the biggest challenges is dealing with complex and ever-changing regulations. Laws and industry standards are often intricate, with many details to track. What's more, these rules frequently change, sometimes without much warning. This means companies must constantly update their knowledge and practices to stay compliant.
Another major concern is balancing compliance with data privacy and security. In today's digital age, many compliance efforts involve handling sensitive information. Companies need to find ways to monitor and report on their activities without putting private data at risk. This can be especially tricky when dealing with customer information or confidential business data.
Resource limitations also pose a significant challenge. Effective compliance monitoring often requires dedicated staff, sophisticated software, and ongoing training. For many businesses, especially smaller ones, finding the budget and personnel for these efforts can be difficult. They must find ways to meet regulatory requirements without breaking the bank or stretching their teams too thin.
Need a Compliance Audit?
Is your business fully aligned with the latest regulations and standards? At Gart Solutions, we specialize in comprehensive compliance monitoring to keep you on the right side of the rules. Our expert team offers tailored audits and monitoring services across various industries, including healthcare, finance, pharmaceuticals, and more.
Ensure your business stays compliant and protected—contact Gart Solutions for a customized compliance audit today!
Monitoring is one of the most important concepts in DevOps. It is a fundamental aspect that goes beyond just graphs showing the state of your product. Monitoring is a general term for collecting data about the behavior of a digital solution (platforms, infrastructure, applications).
DevOps monitoring involves overseeing the entire development lifecycle, ensuring data protection, and quickly responding to and resolving errors. It encompasses various levels such as cloud services monitoring, infrastructure monitoring, abstraction level monitoring (e.g., containers), and application monitoring. Through monitoring, DevOps teams can ensure that their systems operate efficiently, stably, and securely, thereby delivering a high-quality end product.
Monitoring in DevOps is like the dashboard of a plane; a cloud architect needs a clear view of every system's performance and potential issues. Just as a pilot relies on instruments to navigate safely, we rely on continuous monitoring to ensure smooth and efficient operations in the cloud.
Roman Burdiuzha, Cloud Architect | Specializing in DevOps & Cloud Solutions
Why Monitoring is Complex?
Monitoring is the interpretation of information about your digital solution in the form you desire. The possibilities are limitless. This variability makes it a rather complex task. Determining what to monitor, what truly matters for the project, requires DevOps engineers to:
Identify what to monitor,
Determine what to display,
Define how to execute these tasks.
The most critical question is not how to monitor, but what to monitor.
Types of Monitoring
At each level, a system has its own set of metrics. For instance, at the cloud level such as AWS, there are metrics for account status, organizational structure—user counts, service instances, virtual machines, policies, and IP addresses—all meticulously recorded. Each service incurs charges, necessitating expense monitoring.
Moving down a level to infrastructure—virtual machines, for example—they have processors, memory, disk usage, etc. This information is logged—how much memory is used, processor load, and network traffic. For instance, a network adapter might handle 1 gigabit per second, and its interface load is measured accordingly.
Next is the abstraction level. Take Docker, where multiple instances of an operating system are launched to run a specific app. Docker provides virtual metrics for memory, CPU usage, and more.
Then there's the application level. Consider an application running on Java. In Java, there's a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) that processes code. The JVM has its metrics—allocated memory, actual memory usage, worker threads, and so forth.
There are also custom-based metrics; for example, an application might track errors occurring and log their frequency per second.
In essence, monitoring involves tracking the state of a solution across these levels to ensure optimal performance, efficiency, and reliability.
Cloud Level Monitoring ( AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, other)
Observes and manages the performance, availability, and health of cloud resources and services provided by cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.
Infrastructure Level Monitoring
Server Monitoring
Network Monitoring
Database Monitoring
Storage Monitoring
Tracks the performance, availability, and health of physical and virtual infrastructure components, including servers, networks, databases, and storage systems.
Abstraction Level Monitoring
Monitors the performance and health of abstraction layers such as containers (e.g., Docker) and orchestration systems (e.g., Kubernetes), as well as virtual machines.
Container Monitoring (e.g., Docker)
Orchestration Monitoring (e.g., Kubernetes)
Virtual Machine Monitoring
Application Level Monitoring
Focuses on tracking the performance, availability, and user interactions of applications, providing insights into response times, error rates, and transaction flows.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM)
Transaction Tracing
User Experience Monitoring
Three Pillars of Monitoring
Logs - Logs record events with timestamps, creating a chronology of processes occurring within the system.
Metrics - Metrics demonstrate resource usage levels or behaviors that can be collected in systems.
Traces - Traces illustrate the journey of a user through the entire application stack.
Best Practices for Log Collection
Ensure maximum standardization of logs.
Avoid collecting confidential information to prevent data leaks.
Configure real-time alerts.
Optimize your log retention policy.
Monitoring Tools
Grafana and Prometheus are among the most widely used, free, and open-source solutions. These tools together create a solid foundation for a robust and reliable monitoring stack, ensuring high-quality analysis.
Grafana: This powerful visualization tool displays data from various sources in customizable dashboards, making it easier to understand and act on complex metrics.
Prometheus: A leading open-source monitoring and alerting toolkit, known for its reliability and scalability in gathering and querying metrics.
Grafana Loki: A log aggregation system that integrates smoothly with Grafana, allowing for comprehensive log management and analysis.
Other notable tools in the monitoring ecosystem include:
Datadog: A comprehensive monitoring and analytics platform that provides visibility into your entire tech stack, from infrastructure to applications.
New Relic: An observability platform that offers detailed insights into application performance, helping to quickly identify and resolve issues.
The key to effective monitoring is not just in the tools used but in determining what to monitor. Identifying the critical metrics that matter most to your project is essential. This approach ensures that you are not overwhelmed with data but are focused on the information that will help you maintain and improve your systems' performance and reliability.
By leveraging these tools and practices, you can create a monitoring setup that provides actionable insights, helping you to quickly respond to issues, optimize performance, and ensure the overall health of your digital solutions.
In today's digital world, businesses rely heavily on their IT infrastructure to operate effectively. Any downtime or performance issues can result in lost productivity, revenue, and brand reputation. This is where infrastructure monitoring comes in.
What Is Infrastructure Monitoring?
Infrastructure monitoring plays a vital role in collecting and analyzing data from various components of a tech stack, including servers, virtual machines, containers, and databases. This data is then analyzed to provide insights into the health and performance of the infrastructure. The tools also provide alerts and notifications when issues are detected, enabling IT teams to take corrective action.
By utilizing infrastructure monitoring practices, organizations can proactively identify and address issues that may impact users and mitigate risks of potential losses in terms of time and money.
Modern software applications must be reliable and resilient to meet clients' needs worldwide. Companies like Amazon are making an average of $14,900 every second in sales, therefore, even 30 seconds of downtime would have cost them thousands of dollars.
For software to keep up with demand, infrastructure monitoring is crucial. It allows teams to collect operational and performance data from their systems to diagnose, fix, and improve them.
Monitoring often includes physical servers, virtual machines, databases, network infrastructure, IoT devices and more. Full-featured monitoring systems can also alert you when something is wrong in your infrastructure.
In this article, we'll explain how infrastructure monitoring works, its primary use cases, typical challenges, use cases and best practices of infrastructure monitoring.
Infrastructure Monitoring: What Should You Monitor?
Infrastructure monitoring is essential for tracking the availability, performance, and resource utilization of backend components, including hosts and containers. By installing monitoring agents on hosts, engineers collect infrastructure metrics and send them to a monitoring platform for analysis. This allows organizations to ensure the availability and proper functioning of critical services for users.
Identifying which parts of your infrastructure to monitor depends on factors such as SLA requirements, system location, and complexity. Google has its Four Golden Signals (latency, traffic, errors, and saturation), which can help your team narrow down important metrics (review the official Google Cloud Monitoring Documentation). AWS, Azure also provides its best practices for monitoring.
Common System Monitoring Metrics Include
Sеrvеrs: Monitor sеrvеr CPU usagе, mеmory usagе, disk I/O, and nеtwork traffic.
Nеtwork: Monitor nеtwork latеncy, packеt loss, bandwidth usagе, and throughput.
Applications: Monitor application rеsponsе timе, еrror ratеs, and transaction volumеs.
Databasеs: Monitor databasе pеrformancе, including quеry rеsponsе timе and transaction throughput.
Sеcurity: Monitor sеcurity еvеnts, including failеd logins, unauthorizеd accеss attеmpts, and malwarе infеctions.
This list of metrics for each system isn't exhaustive. Rather, you should determine your business requirements and expectations for different parts of the infrastructure. These baselines will help you better understand what metrics should be monitored and establish guidelines for setting alerting thresholds.
Use Cases of Infrastructure Monitoring
Operations teams, DevOps engineers and SREs (site reliability engineers) generally use infrastructure monitoring to:
1. Troublеshoot pеrformancе issues
Infrastructure monitoring is instrumental in preventing incidents from escalating into outages. By using an infrastructure monitoring tool, engineers can quickly identify failed or latency-affected hosts, containers, or other backend components during an incident. In the event of an outage, they can pinpoint the responsible hosts or containers, facilitating the resolution of support tickets and addressing customer-facing issues effectively.
2. Optimize infrastructure use
Proactive cost reduction is another significant benefit of infrastructure monitoring. By analyzing the monitoring data, organizations can identify overprovisioned or underutilized servers and take necessary actions such as decommissioning them or consolidating workloads onto fewer hosts. Furthermore, infrastructure monitoring enables the redistribution of requests from underprovisioned hosts to overprovisioned ones, ensuring balanced utilization across the infrastructure.
Learn from this case study how Gart helped with AWS Cost Optimization and CI/CD Automation for the Entertainment Software Platform.
3. Forecast backend requirements
Historical infrastructure metrics provide valuable insights for predicting future resource consumption. For example, if certain hosts were found to be underprovisioned during a recent product launch, organizations can leverage this information to allocate additional CPU and memory resources during similar events. By doing so, they reduce strain on critical systems, minimizing the risk of revenue-draining outages.
4. Configuration assurancе tеsting
One of the prominent use cases of infrastructure monitoring is enhancing the testing process. Small and mid-size businesses utilize infrastructure monitoring to ensure the stability of their applications during or after feature updates. By monitoring the infrastructure, they can proactively detect any issues that may arise and take corrective measures, ensuring that their applications remain robust and reliable.
Ready to level up your Infrastructure Management? Contact us today and let our experienced team empower your organization with streamlined processes, automation, and continuous integration.
Infrastructure Monitoring Best Practices
Infrastructure monitoring best practices involve a combination of key strategies and techniques to ensure efficient and effective monitoring of your infrastructure. Here are some recommended practices to consider:
1. Opt for automation
To enhance Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR), leverage from the best infrastructure monitoring tools that offer automation capabilities. By adopting AIOps for infrastructure monitoring, you can achieve comprehensive end-to-end observability across your entire stack, facilitating quicker issue detection and resolution.
3. Install the agent across your entire environment
Rather than installing the monitoring agent on specific applications and their supporting environments, it is advisable to deploy it across your entire production environment. This approach provides a more holistic view of your infrastructure's health and performance, enabling you to make informed decisions based on comprehensive data.
Google Ops Agent Overview | AWS Systems Manager OpsCenter
3. Set up and prioritize alerts
Given the potential for numerous alerts in an infrastructure monitoring system, it's crucial to prioritize them effectively. As an SRE, focus on identifying and addressing the most critical alerts promptly, ensuring that essential issues are promptly resolved while minimizing distractions caused by less urgent notifications.
Google Cloud Monitoring Alerting Policy | AWS Alerting Policy
4. Create custom dashboards
Take advantage of the customization options available in infrastructure monitoring tools. Tools like Middleware offer the ability to create custom dashboards tailored to specific roles and requirements. By leveraging these capabilities, you can streamline your monitoring experience, presenting relevant information to different stakeholders in a clear and accessible manner.
5. Test your tools
Before integrating new applications or tools for infrastructure monitoring, testing is vital. This practice ensures that the monitoring setup functions correctly and all components are working as expected. By performing test runs, you can identify and address any potential issues before they impact your live environment.
6. Configure native integrations
If your infrastructure includes AWS resources, it is beneficial to configure native integrations with your infrastructure monitoring solution. For example, setting up the AWS EC2 integration allows for the automatic import of tags and metadata associated with your instances. This integration facilitates data filtering, provides real-time views, and enables scalability in line with your cloud infrastructure.
7. Activate integrations for comprehensive monitoring
Extend your infrastructure monitoring beyond CPU, memory, and storage utilization. Activate pre-configured integrations with services such as AWS CloudWatch, AWS Billing, AWS ELB, MySQL, NGINX, and more. These integrations enable monitoring of the services supporting your hosts and provide access to dedicated dashboards for each integrated service.
8. Create filter set for efficient resource management
Utilize the filter set functionality offered by your monitoring solution to organize hosts, cluster roles, and other resources based on relevant criteria. By applying filters based on imported EC2 tags or custom tags, you can optimize resource monitoring, proactively detect and resolve issues, and gain a comprehensive overview of your infrastructure's performance.
9. Set up alert conditions based on filtered data
Instead of creating individual alert conditions for each host, leverage the filtering capabilities to create alert conditions based on filtered data. This approach automates the addition and removal of hosts from the alert conditions as they match the specified tags. By aligning alerts with your infrastructure's tags, you ensure scalability and efficient alert management.
Wrapping Up
In conclusion, infrastructure monitoring is critical for ensuring the performance and availability of IT infrastructure. By following best practices and partnering with a trusted provider like Gart, organizations can detect issues proactively, optimize performance and be sure the IT infrastructure is 99,9% available, robust, and meets your current and future business needs. Leverage external expertise and unlock the full potential of your IT infrastructure through IT infrastructure outsourcing!
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